UPS Phishing Scam Targets Cyber Monday Shoppers

As soon as you hit "confirm purchase," the anticipation begins: when will your package arrive?

Preying on the emtionally charged experience, hackers know many of you will throw caution to the wind and click into an email that says “UPS package not delivered.”

This latest email scam has been mutating and progressing since early November, according to antispam vendor Cloudmark, with reports spiking over Thanksgiving weekend.

“We’ve seen a number of variants in this campaign (some with attachments, some with no attachments and bad links), all of them personalized to the recipient, and sent from an ever-changing list of fake UPS employees or the generic ‘UPS Customer Services,'" Cloudmark wrote in a blog post.

"The from address is faked so that it appears to come from the domain ups.com. Many of the images are copied from legitimate UPS emails and many of the links go to the legitimate UPS site. However, clicking on the call-to-action link that says 'Track your shipment now' will take the unsuspecting consumer to a website that can infect the computer with a virus."

As you can see in the screenshot above (click to enlarge), the fraudulent email is sent from what appears to be an @ups.com address, and typically contain either an attached zip file containing a virus, or includes a link to “Track your shipment now!” which really just directs you to an infected site.

UPS told MSNBC that any direct emails “rarely” contain attachments. Best to just not open them at all.

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